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Overview

Charlie Piot, Ph.D. University of Virginia 1986, Chair and Professor of Cultural Anthropology and African and African American Studies, does research on the political economy and history of rural West Africa. His first book, Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa (1999), attempted to retheorize a classic out-of-the-way place as within the modern and the global. His recent book, Nostalgia for the Future: West Africa after the Cold War (2010), explores shifts in Togolese political culture during the 1990s, a time when the NGOs and charismatic churches take over the biopolitical, reorganizing social and political life in the absence of the state. His current project is on Togolese who apply for and attempt to game the US Diversity Visa Lottery.